Psychopath attorneys

Well, if you are *really* serious about figuring out a killer's mind you've to look beyond psychopathic personalities and explore the dissociative ego states ... Fugues, amnesias, sleep-walking, sleep talking, multiple personality; and other altered state phenomena were thought to be among the manifestations of persons who employed dissociation as a repressive defense. The general notion was that a few persons, well enough developed to merit the general diagnosis of neurotic, employed dissociative mechanisms in the service of fending off unwanted or unacceptable ideas and impulses. Dissociation was formulated as a "vertical" splitting of the personality; that is, a temporal or contextual separation or walling off of one or several aspects or constellations of personality from other aspects. Vertical splitting was thought to contrast with the more widespread concept of repressive "horizontal" splitting, that is, a separation of so-called conscious from unconscious personality manifestations or constellations.

Psychiatric Annals devoted its January, 1984 issue to a series of updated reports from prominent researchers and clinicians in this area. Donald Schafer in June, 1984 has reported on his impressions from a long-term multiple personality study group which he heads. Since that time a mushrooming literature suggests a marked increase in the frequency of multiple personality diagnosis. Most authors in one way or another attribute this increased frequency to increased sensitivity on the part of members of the therapeutic community. The effects of media information on the clinical population seem to be, "it is okay to be a multiple, there are others like me." But some observers question even if multiple personalities exist or if the idea represents some sort of ruse people use to get off the hook for things they do. Legal implications regarding personal responsibility for activities sometimes cloud clinical issues.

The vast majority of reported cases are women (9 out of 10 or at least 4 out of 5). The chief etiological hypothesis is exposure to overwhelming experiences in early childhood, usually of a violent, intrusive sexual nature. The supposed early traumas are often reported as some form of incest perpetrated by an older male, though mothers or other women are frequently named as co- or passive collaborators. More recently multiples have claimed memories of satanic ritual abuse or abductions by space aliens. Frequent homosexual themes are said to appear in male multiple personalities and are presumed etiologically related to the maleness of the molester. No other significant etiological hypotheses tend to be cited in the literature though direct trauma or abuse often cannot be confirmed and corroborating evidence of satanic cults and alien abduction is lacking. The possibility continues to arise that, since the therapist expects to hear of early abuse, the person produces it — certainly a possibility that has been noted often enough in other kinds of therapeutic research. In the earlier literature persons with multiple personalities are generally spoken of as being exceptionally intelligent with IQ's often estimated to exceed 130, though that factor is not emphasized so much recently. High intelligence has sometimes been postulated as a key factor which kept the person from becoming seriously psychotic (Schafer, 1984).

The central dynamic universally cited is that at the moment of severe stress part of the personality defensively splits off. Altered states are said to emerge for the "purpose" of avoiding traumatic (sexual or violent) overstimulation. The effect of the split in terms of pervasiveness is said to range on a continuum from most of the person's conscious life to only occasional dissociations under conditions of severe stress in an otherwise intact personality. Schafer (1984) states, "a personality comes into existence when the personality already in existence can no longer tolerate the world. That new personality may then be brought back in parallel emotional situations." Researchers are not altogether clear on the nature of subsequent additional splits — whether later traumas which are different in character tend to produce altered personality states compatible with the type or source of the new trauma or whether splitting simply becomes adopted as a style with later splits representing attempts to cope with other aspects of one's personality. In using the concept "defense" as a cause for splitting, researchers neglect to differentiate between "defense" meaning fending off real intrusions, and "defense" as used in the more traditional sense meaning fending off unconscious wish/fear contents or psychic conflicts of various types. The diagnostic and therapeutic approach most often described is based upon the assumption that there was, in fact, traumatic abuse and that therapeutic benefit comes through encouraging repeated abreactions related to the supposed traumas.

Well, for the sake of truth, A.Dawn, if you are really serious about figuring out the killer's mind you DON'T have to look beyond psychopathic personalities. It is by now settled that The Temperament is a very important determinant of killing behavior (although one of the most difficult areas to research). However, Swank & Marchand did propose the existence of 2% of combat soldiers who are predisposed to be "aggressive psychopaths" and who apparently do not experience the trauma commonly associated with killing behavior. What these individuals represent -- and this is a terribly important point that we must emphasize -- is the capacity for the levelheaded participation in combat that we as a society glorify and that Hollywood would have us believe that all soldiers possess. Dyer's World War II figure of 1% of U.S. Army Air Corps fighter pilots being responsible for 40% of all kills is also generally in keeping with the Swank & Marchand estimates. Erich Hartmann, the World War II German ace -- unquestionably the greatest fighter pilot of all time, with 351 confirmed victories -- claimed that 80% of his victims never knew he was in the same sky with them. This claim, if accurate, provides a remarkable insight into the nature of such a killer. Like the kills of most successful snipers and fighter pilots, the vast majority of the killing done by these men were what some would call simple ambushes, and back shootings. No provocation, anger, or emotion empowered these killings.

Perhaps there is another analogy. According to Carl Jung, there are deeply ingrained models of behavior called archetypes that exist deep in every human's unconscious -- an inhereted unconscious reservoir of images derived from our ancestors' universal experiences and shared by the whole human race. These powerful archetypes can drive us by channeling our libidinal energy. They include such Jungian concepts as the mother, the wise old man, the hero, and the warrior. Jung could have referred to these individuals as "warriors." Nevertheless, a veteran quoted by Dyer shows a deep understanding of the tremendous pressures many factors place on the ordinary basically decent soldier:

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You put those same kids in the jungle for a while, get them real scared, deprive them of sleep, and let a few incidents change some of their fears to hate. Give them a sergeant who has seen too many of his men killed by booby traps and by lack of distrust and who feels that Vietnamese are dumb, dirty, and weak, because they are not like him. Add a little mob pressure, and these nice kids who accompany us today would rape like champions. Kill, rape and steal is the name of the game."

How about an Attention-Seeker plus The Wannabe plus The Guru AND The Sociopath?

The Internet provides the perfect forum for cyberbullies, individuals whose aim is to gain gratification from the distress caused by provoking and tormenting others. The anonymity, ease of provocation, and almost infinite source of targets means the Internet is full of predators from pedophiles targeting children to serial bullies targeting ... anybody. Cyberbullies get a perverse sense of satisfaction (called gratification) from sending people flame mail and hate mail. Flame mail is an email whose contents are designed to inflame and enrage. Hate mail is hatred (including prejudice, racism, sexism etc) in an email.

Serial bullies harbour a lot of internal aggression which they direct at others. This may include projection, false criticism and patronizing sarcasm whilst contributing nothing of any value. It may also include a common tactic of "a number of people have emailed me backchannel to agree with me." In every case it's a fabrication or a distortion - usually the former. It's also a variant of the serial bully head teacher who says "a number of parents have complained to me about you..." When challenged, the identity of the alleged complainants can't be disclosed because it's "confidential."

The method of creating conflict is provocation which bullies delight in because they know they can always coerce at least one person to respond in a manner which can then be distorted and used to further flame and inflame people. And so it goes on. The bully then sits back and gains gratification from seeing others engage in destructive behavior towards each other. This is known as trolling. Most serial bullies are also serial attention-seekers. More than anything else they want attention. It doesn't matter what type of attention they get, positive or negative, as long as they can provoke someone into paying them attention. It's like a 2-year-old child throwing a tantrum to get attention from a parent. The best way to treat bullies is to refuse to respond and to refuse to engage them - which they really hate. In other words, do not reply to their postings, and on forums carry on posting without reference to their postings as if they didn't exist. In other words, treat nobodies as nobodies. The purpose of this tactic is to wind people up. Don't be fooled into believing it has any validity - it doesn't. People who bully are adept at creating conflict between those who would otherwise pool negative information about them.

The anger of a serial bully is especially apparent when they come across someone who can see through them to espy the weak, inadequate, immature, dysfunctional aggressive individual behind the mask. If you receive abusive posts or hate mail from someone on the boards, use the 'report this post' function. If you are receiving persistent abusive emails , forward them to abuse@isp where "isp" is the service provider the abuser is using, eg "aol.com" or "yahoo.com". Although Internet service providers may not act on every complaint, the more complaints they receive about a particular individual (with examples of abusive email) the more likely they are to close down the person's account. The objectives of bullies are Power, Control, Domination, Subjugation. They get a kick out of seeing you react. It doesn't matter how you react, the fact they've successful provoked a reaction is, to the bully, a sign that their attempt at control have been successful. After that, it's a question of wearing you down. The more your try to explain, negotiate, conciliate, etc the more gratification they obtain from your increasingly desperate attempts to communicate with them. Understand that it is not possible to communicate in a mature adult manner with a disordered individual who's emotionally retarded.

[...] Like the kills of most successful snipers and fighter pilots, the vast majority of the killing done by these men were what some would call simple ambushes, and back shootings. No provocation, anger, or emotion empowered these killings.

[...]

But of course - these are the kinds of nihilistic killers - there is a movie "Mr. Brooks" which depicts a guy who killed people for the hell of it..

How about an Attention-Seeker plus The Wannabe plus The Guru AND The Sociopath?

[...] The anonymity, ease of provocation, and almost infinite source of targets means the Internet is full of predators from pedophiles targeting children to serial bullies targeting ... anybody. [...]

[...]

[...] The bully then sits back and gains gratification from seeing others engage in destructive behavior towards each other. This is known as trolling. Most serial bullies are also serial attention-seekers. More than anything else they want attention. It doesn't matter what type of attention they get, positive or negative, as long as they can provoke someone into paying them attention. It's like a 2-year-old child throwing a tantrum to get attention from a parent. The best way to treat bullies is to refuse to respond and to refuse to engage them - which they really hate. [...] In other words, treat nobodies as nobodies. [...]

[...] The objectives of bullies are Power, Control, Domination, Subjugation. They get a kick out of seeing you react. It doesn't matter how you react, the fact they've successful provoked a reaction is, to the bully, a sign that their attempt at control have been successful. After that, it's a question of wearing you down. The more your try to explain, negotiate, conciliate, etc the more gratification they obtain from your increasingly desperate attempts to communicate with them. Understand that it is not possible to communicate in a mature adult manner with a disordered individual who's emotionally retarded.

[...] People have no rights and he, the psychopath, has no obligations that derive from the "social contract." The psychopath holds himself to be above conventional morality and the law. The psychopath cannot delay gratification. He wants everything and wants it now. His whims, urges, catering to his needs, and the satisfaction of his drives take precedence over the needs, preferences, and emotions of even his nearest and dearest.

Consequently, psychopaths feel no remorse when they hurt or defraud others. They don't possess even the most rudimentary conscience. They rationalize their (often criminal) behavior and intellectualize it. Psychopaths fall prey to their own primitive defense mechanisms (such as narcissism, splitting, and projection). [...] The psychopath projects his own vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and shortcomings unto others and force them to behave the way he expects them to (this defense mechanism is known as "projective identification") [...]

As to the mechanism you mention - I have read about a similar concept in social psychology - that of self-fulfilling prophecy, a process in which we find confirmation and proof for our stereotypes by creating stereotypical behavior in out-group members through our treatment of them. Word, Zanna & Cooper in 1974 conducted a set of experiments that shows such. In the first study, they asked white students to interview job applicants who were either white or black. The students tended to display discomfort when interviewing the blacks; for instance, they sat further away, stammered, and ended the interview earlier. In a second study, the researchers varied the behavior of the student interviewers so that the latter acted towards a job applicant either the way that the interviewers had acted towards whites or the way they had acted towards blacks in the first study. They found that those applicants who had been interviewed in the way that blacks had been interviewed were judged to be more nervous and less effective than the others.

[...] People have no rights and he, the psychopath, has no obligations that derive from the "social contract." The psychopath holds himself to be above conventional morality and the law. The psychopath cannot delay gratification. He wants everything and wants it now. His whims, urges, catering to his needs, and the satisfaction of his drives take precedence over the needs, preferences, and emotions of even his nearest and dearest.

Consequently, psychopaths feel no remorse when they hurt or defraud others. They don't possess even the most rudimentary conscience. They rationalize their (often criminal) behavior and intellectualize it. Psychopaths fall prey to their own primitive defense mechanisms (such as narcissism, splitting, and projection). [...] The psychopath projects his own vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and shortcomings unto others and force them to behave the way he expects them to (this defense mechanism is known as "projective identification") [...]

As to the mechanism you mention - I have read about a similar concept in social psychology - that of self-fulfilling prophecy, a process in which we find confirmation and proof for our stereotypes by creating stereotypical behavior in out-group members through our treatment of them. Word, Zanna & Cooper in 1974 conducted a set of experiments that shows such. In the first study, they asked white students to interview job applicants who were either white or black. The students tended to display discomfort when interviewing the blacks; for instance, they sat further away, stammered, and ended the interview earlier. In a second study, the researchers varied the behavior of the student interviewers so that the latter acted towards a job applicant either the way that the interviewers had acted towards whites or the way they had acted towards blacks in the first study. They found that those applicants who had been interviewed in the way that blacks had been interviewed were judged to be more nervous and less effective than the others.

No kidding, Violet Bear - PI appears to be "the man" - here it is a related post on how groups rely on the phenomenon to function

Fight/Flight mentality and the choice of a leader in the Fight/Flight group

As to the choice of a leader for a fight/flight group, Bion says:

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"It is usually a man or woman with marked paranoid trends; perhaps, if the presence of an enemy is not immediately obvious to the group, the next best thing is for the group to choose a leader to whom it is."

This statement is important for several reasons. First, it makes it obvious that, according to Bion, it is not the leader who chooses his group -- neither according to his own needs or his perception of the group's needs -- but much more the basic assumption group which seeks and chooses its appropriate leader according to its (unconscious) needs. And second, the group's need to find an enemy, against whom they can either fight or from which they can flee, exists even before that enemy has been found, discovered or, indeed, invented. In other words, one might say, that if the Jews hadn't been there already for the Nazis to identify as the enemy, responsible for their miserable plight, the Nazis would have had to invent them! And as for the leadership role in this fight/flight dynamic, the German people were highly successful in picking a personality from among their ranks (who was, of course not even a German, but an Austrian!), and whose capacities as a leader of the fight/flight basic assumption have remained virtually unparalleled in history, Adolph Hitler. According to Bion, leadership is a product of the group mentality, not its origin. He writes:

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The leader, on the basic assumption level, does not create the group by virtue of his fanatical adherence to an idea, but is rather an individual whose personality renders him peculiarly susceptible to the obliteration of individuality by the basic group's leadership requirements.

And here Bion links this phenomenon with the Kleinian theory of projective identification:

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To me the leader is as much the creature of the basic assumption as any other member of the group, and this, I think, is to be expected if we envisage identification of the individual with the leader as depending not on introjection alone but on a simultaneous process of projective identification.

This "loss of individual distinctiveness" applies to the leader as much as to anyone else.

Thus the leader in the fight/flight group, for example, appears to have a distinctive personality because his personality is of a kind that lends itself to exploitation by the group demand for a leader who requires of it only a capacity for fighting or for flight; the leader has no greater freedom to be himself than any other member of the group. Bion compares this leader with

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"an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his own will. He is leader by virtue of his capacity for instantaneous, involuntary combination with every other member of his group and only differs from them in that, whatever his function in the work group, he is the incarnation of the basic assumption group leader.

Bion points out that it is incapable of tolerating frustration in the long run, because in the sphere of basic assumption phenomena, time itself is not a relevant, not even an existent dimension of reality. Flight offers an immediately available opportunity for expression of the emotion in the fight/flight group and therefore meets the demand for instantaneous satisfaction -- therefore the group will take flight. Alternatively, attack offers a similarly immediate outlet -- then the group will fight. The fight/flight group will follow any leader who will give such orders as license instantaneous flight or instantaneous attack.

[...]

Containment as a leadership style -- where does it come from?

How containing the style of the leader and how given to blaming others when things go wrong (paranoid/schizoid position) versus acknowledging one's or one's institution's contribution towards the trouble one is in (depressive position), depends to a very large degree on the individual's capacity to maintain a relatively mature stance as opposed to falling into a defensive/paranoid one, and this capacity is based on early experiences and their later reworking as the life-cycle progresses. The assumption underlying this aspect of psychoanalytic theory suggests that the conditions necessary in order for a proper Container-Contained relationship in the Bionic sense to come into being are:

a) when an individual has him/herself had sufficient experience of containment in the course of his or her personal development, and b) when s/he has thereby developed a capacity to identify both with the container as well as with "being contained" and then, through the process of introjective identification, has been able to include this as a significant and stable aspect of his or her own internal life.

This developmental process thus enables one to increase one's capacity to contain, and to employ containment of anxiety as a psychic tool, which can then be utilised as necessary in the authoritative execution of leadership roles.

[...] They are often convinced that the celebrity is sending them cryptic messages intended only for them to understand. Erotomanic delusions last an average of 10 years.

I can just imagine what hell the chased person must have gone through during those 10 years!

Horrible indeed! The core of the syndrome is that the affected person has a delusional belief that another person, usually of higher social status, is secretly in love with them. The sufferer may also believe that the subject of their delusion secretly communicates their love by subtle methods such as body posture, arrangement of household objects and other seemingly innocuous acts (or, if the person is a public figure, through clues in the media). The object of the delusion usually has little or no contact with the delusional person, who often believes that the object initiated the fictional relationship. Erotomanic delusions are typically found as the primary symptom of delusional disorder, or in the context of schizophrenia.

Occasionally the subject of the delusion may not actually exist, although more commonly, the subjects are media figures such as popular singers, actors and politicians. Erotomania has been cited as one cause for stalking or harassment campaigns. The assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. was reported to have been driven by an erotomanic delusion that the death of the president would cause actress Jodie Foster to publicly declare her love for Hinckley. Late night comedian David Letterman and retired astronaut Story Musgrave were the targets of delusional Margaret Mary Ray. Other reported celebrity targets of erotomania include Madonna, Steven Spielberg, Zachary Quinto, Britney Spears, Barbara Mandrell, and Linda Ronstadt.

Delusional Disorder is indeed horrible - I remember some years ago when my neighbor, a twenty-nine-years old male, approached the authorities (the police) and asked them for protection; he told them his life was in danger because of a group of individuals who were following and harassing him on a daily basis for over a year or so. His wife told the police no actual threat had been made by anyone. He was functioning rather satisfactorily in work and his social relations and did not appear to have any other complaints. The police believed him initially and had several people watch him for a time period, only to discover that no one was, in actuality, following the guy. He was referred for psychiatric evaluation and found to suffer from delusional disorder.

[...] And just as wars can produce exciting opportunities for murderous psychopaths to shine (think of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic), Babiak found that these organizational shake-ups created a welcoming environment for the corporate killer. "The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change; in fact, he or she thrives on it," Babiak claims. "Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior."

[...] Hare has revised his Psychopathy Checklist (known as the PCL-R, or simply "the Hare") to make it easier to identify so-called subcriminal or corporate psychopaths. He has broken down the 20 personality characteristics into two subsets, or "factors." Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor 1, the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others" category. [...] Sound like anyone you know? (Corporate psychopaths score only low to moderate on Factor 2, which pinpoints "chronically unstable, antisocial, and socially deviant lifestyle," the hallmarks of people who wind up in jail for rougher crimes than creative accounting.)

[...] Manipulative? Louis B. Mayer was said to be a better actor than any of the stars he employed at MGM, able to turn on the tears at will to evoke sympathy during salary negotiations with his actors. Callous? Henry Ford hired thugs to crush union organizers, deployed machine guns at his plants, and stockpiled tear gas. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal assistant and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a cover. Lacking empathy? Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley shouted profanities at and summarily fired hundreds of employees allegedly for trivialities, like a maid missing a piece of lint. [...]

Extremely interesting zanna .. could you pls expand a lil bit on this "corporate killer"?

Delusional Disorder is indeed horrible - I remember some years ago when my neighbor, a twenty-nine-years old male, approached the authorities (the police) and asked them for protection; he told them his life was in danger because of a group of individuals who were following and harassing him on a daily basis for over a year or so. His wife told the police no actual threat had been made by anyone. He was functioning rather satisfactorily in work and his social relations and did not appear to have any other complaints. The police believed him initially and had several people watch him for a time period, only to discover that no one was, in actuality, following the guy. He was referred for psychiatric evaluation and found to suffer from delusional disorder.

Hello zanna - here it is an interesting post on paranoia (delusional disorders)

By definition, projection dominates the psychology of the paranoid person. Depending on the patinet's ego strength and degree of stress, it may be a psychotic, borderline, or neurotic level of projection. In a frankly psychotic person, upsetting parts of self are projected and fully believed to be "out there," no matter how crazy the projections may seem to others. The paranoid schizophrenic who believes that homosexual Bulgarian agents have poisoned his water is projecting his aggression, his wish for same-sex closeness, his ethnocentrism, and his fantasies of power. He does not find ways of making his beliefs fit with conventional notions of reality; he may be quite convinced that he is the only one in the world who sees the threat. Because reality testing is by definition not lost in people at a borderline level of personality organization, paranoid patients in the borderline range project in such a way that those on whom disowned attitudes are projected are subtly provoked to feel those attitudes. This is projective identification: The person tries to get rid of certain feelings, yet retains empathy with them and needs to reassure the self that they are realistic. The borderline paranoid person works to make his or her projections "fit" the projective target. Thus the woman who disowns her hatred and envy announces to her therapist in an antagonistic manner that she can tell that the therapist is jealous of her accomplishments; interpretations given in a sympathetic spirit are reinterpreted by the client as evidence of envy-driven wishes to undermine and control, and soon the therapist, worn down by being steadily misunderstood, is hating the patient and envying her freedom to vent her spleen. In paranoid people at the neurotic level, internal issues are projected in a potentially ego-alien way. That is, the patient projects yet has some observing part of the self that eventually will be capable, in the context of a reliable relationship, of acknowledging the externalized contents of the mind as projection.

The need of the paranoid person to handle upsetting feelings projectively entails the use of an unusual degree of denial and its close relative, reaction formation. All human beings project; indeed, the universal disposition toward projection is the basis for transference, the process that makes analytic therapy possible. But paranoid people do it in the context of such a great need to disavow upsetting attitudes that it feels like a whole different process from projective operations in which denial is not so integral.

The main polarity in the self-representations of paranoid people is an impotent, humiliated, and despised image of self versus an omnipotent, vindicated, triumphant one. A tension between two images suffuses their subjective world. Cruelly, neither position affords any solace: A terror of abuse and contempt goes with the weak side of the polarity, while the strong side brings with it the inevitable side effect of psychological power, a crushing guilt. The weak side of this polarity is the degree of fear with which paranoid people chronically live. They never feel fully safe and spend an inordinate amount of their emotional energy scanning the environment for dangers. The grandiose side is evident in their self-referential stance: Everything that happens has something to do with them personally. The megalomania of paranoid people, whether unconscious or overt, burderns them with unbearable guilt. If I am omnipotent, then all kinds of terrible things are my fault. The intimate connection between guilt and paranoia can be intuitively comprehended by any of us who have felt culpable and then worried about being exposed and punished.

A complex and pervasive issue for many paranoid people is the combination of sexual identity confusion, longings for same-sex closeness, and associated preoccupations with homosexuality. A connection between paranoia and homosexual preoccupations has been frequently noted by clinicians and has been confirmed by some empirical studies. Paranoid people, even the minority of them who have acted on homoerotic feelings, may regard the idea of same-sex attraction as upsetting to a degree that is scarcely imaginable to the non-paranoid. As the brief triumph of Nazism demonstrates, when paranoid trends are shared by a whole culture or subculture, the most horrific possibilities arise. The paranoid preoccupation with homosexuality has sometimes been explained as reflecting "unconscious homosexual impulses." This locution is misleading, in that it is not usually genital urges that stimulate homophobia; it is loneliness and the wish for a soulmate. Because as children we were comfortable with peers of the same sex before we became comfortable with opposite-sex peers, and because people of the same sex are more like us than people of the opposite sex, when we are withdrawn from everyone, we are attracted to someone of the same sex. Unfortunately, the patient becomes aware of this attraction, misinterprets it as homosexuality, and this sets off the defenses. In other words, at the core of the self-experience of paranoid poeple is a profound emotional isolation and need for a "consensual validation" from a "chum."

[...] Like the kills of most successful snipers and fighter pilots, the vast majority of the killing done by these men were what some would call simple ambushes, and back shootings. No provocation, anger, or emotion empowered these killings.

[...]

But of course - these are the kinds of nihilistic killers - there is a movie "Mr. Brooks" which depicts a guy who killed people for the hell of it..

Examining his modus operandi, from the fastidious preparation and cleaning up of the crime scene before departing, it looks like Brooks was obsessed with not getting caught (he responds to Smith's inquiry as to whether the person they would agree on killing could be someone who he knew, by saying, that you never kill someone you know, that's the surest way to get caught) - and yet, as Smith lies dying, Brooks reveals that he used many different MOs before becoming the meticulous Thumbprint Killer.